By TIM WEINER

Published: April 9, 2012

Mike Wallace, the CBS reporter who became one of America's best-known broadcast journalists as an interrogator of the famous and infamous on ''60 Minutes,'' died on Saturday. He was 93.

On its Web site, CBS said Mr. Wallace died at a care facility in New Canaan, Conn., where he had lived in recent years. Mr. Wallace, who received a pacemaker more than 20 years ago, had a long history of cardiac care and underwent triple bypass heart surgery in January 2008.

A reporter with the presence of a performer, Mr. Wallace went head to head with chiefs of state, celebrities and con artists for more than 50 years, living for when ''you forget the lights, the cameras, everything else, and you're really talking to each other,'' he said in an interview with The New York Times videotaped in July 2006 and released on his death as part of the online feature ''Last Word.''

Mr. Wallace created enough such moments to become a paragon of television journalism in the heyday of network news. As he grilled his subjects, he said, he walked ''a fine line between sadism and intellectual curiosity.''

His success often lay in the questions he hurled, not the answers he received.

''Perjury,'' he said, in his staccato style, to President Richard M. Nixon's right-hand man, John D. Ehrlichman, while interviewing him during the Watergate affair. ''Plans to audit tax returns for political retaliation. Theft of psychiatric records. Spying by undercover agents. Conspiracy to obstruct justice. All of this by the law-and-order administration of Richard Nixon.''

Mr. Ehrlichman paused and said, ''Is there a question in there somewhere?''

No, Mr. Wallace later conceded. But it was riveting television.

Both the style and the substance of his work drew criticism. CBS paid Nixon's chief of staff H. R. Haldeman $100,000 for exclusive (if inconclusive) interviews with Mr. Wallace in 1975. Critics called it checkbook journalism, and Mr. Wallace conceded later that was ''a bad idea.''

For a 1976 report on Medicaid fraud, the show's producers set up a simulated health clinic in Chicago. Was the use of deceit to expose deceit justified? Hidden cameras and ambush interviews were all part of the game, Mr. Wallace said, though he abandoned those techniques in later years, when they became clich?and no longer good television.

Some subjects were unfazed by Mr. Wallace's unblinking stare. When he sat down with the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, in 1979, he said that President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt ''calls you, Imam -- forgive me, his words, not mine -- a lunatic.'' The translator blanched, but the Ayatollah responded, calmly calling Sadat a heretic.

''Forgive me'' was a favorite Wallace phrase, the caress before the garrote. ''As soon as you hear that,'' he told The Times, ''you realize the nasty question's about to come.''

Mr. Wallace invented his hard-boiled persona on a program called ''Night Beat.'' Television was black and white, and so was the discourse, when the show went on in 1956, weeknights at 11, on the New York affiliate of the short-lived DuMont television network.

''We had lighting that was warts-and-all close-ups,'' he remembered. The camera closed in tighter and tighter on the guests. The smoke from Mr. Wallace's cigarette swirled between him and his quarry. Sweat beaded on his subject's brows.

''I was asking tough questions,'' he said. ''And I had found my bliss.'' He had become Mike Wallace.

''All of a sudden,'' he said, ''I was no longer anonymous.'' He was ''the fiery prosecutor, the righteous and wrathful D.A. determined to rid Gotham City of its undesirables,'' in the words of Michael J. Arlen, The New Yorker's television critic.

''Night Beat'' moved to ABC in 1957 as a half-hour, coast-to-coast, prime-time program, renamed ''The Mike Wallace Interview.'' ABC, then the perennial loser among the major networks, promoted him as ''the Terrible Torquemada of the TV Inquisition.''

Mr. Wallace's career path meandered after ABC canceled ''The Mike Wallace Interview'' in 1958. He had done entertainment shows and quiz shows and cigarette commercials. He had acted onstage. But he resolved to become a real journalist after a harrowing journey to recover the body of his firstborn son, Peter, who died at 19 in a mountain-climbing accident in Greece in 1962.

''He was going to be a writer,'' Mr. Wallace said in the interview with The Times. ''And so I said, 'I'm going to do something that would make Peter proud.' ''

Forging a Career Path

He set his sights on CBS News and joined the network as a special correspondent. He was soon anchoring ''The CBS Morning News With Mike Wallace'' and reporting from Vietnam. Then he caught the eye of Richard Nixon.

Running for president, Nixon offered Mr. Wallace a job as his press secretary shortly before the 1968 primaries began. ''I thought very, very seriously about it,'' Mr. Wallace told The Times. ''I regarded him with great respect. He was savvy, smart, hard working.''

But Mr. Wallace turned Nixon down, saying that putting a happy face on bad news was not his cup of tea.

Only months later ''60 Minutes'' made its debut, at 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 1968.